This week DRM prevented pre-screenings of James Cameron’s latest movie “Avatar” from taking place in Germany.

It took them a day to figure out the problem. When you read the comments from the German news site heise (heise.de covers topics like Slashdot) you’ll find a lot of people expressing their schadenfreude. While I feel sorry for James Cameron the director I feel not sorry for the businessperson James Cameron. DRM simply sucks. If you make evil deals with the copyright/content protection industry (allow your movies to be distributed with DRM – in all it’s flavours, this includes the incredibly stupid region code system on DVDs) you are collaborating with what I would consider the ultimate enemy of creativity. Yes, Karma is a bitch.

If this is the future of cinema I am now seriously thinking of boycotting DRMed digital cinema altogether. I might not go and watch Avatar now and I might not go and watch any movie that is digitally projected and uses DRM technology.

And yes, I too can feel schadenfreude here. Quite a lot actually. DRM is simply a tool to screw the customer. But it’s good to see that it also keeps screwing those who use it. Karma is a real bitch. And so is DRM.

And while corrupted politicians are busy working on a secret deal to implement ACTA (basically a carte blanche for the copyright industry and the MAFIAA) Pirate Parties all over the world are forming and gaining more and more mainstream attention. 2% of Germans voted for the Pirate Party at the last general election. Let it be 20% next time. Or more.

You can’t sell art and bring joy to people when you are just milking the cash cow and screwing your customers.

openArtist, the artist friendly multimedia Linux distro, based on the latest Ubuntu KarmicKoala, is out now and you can find my own Blender presets for video editing and making titles included in this latest release (see the “Vid” menu)!

Help and documentation are central to the openArtist user experience, in short (from the website):

“The applications are not only installed: They are configured”

And very important for me: openArtist comes without PulseAudio installed…! This finally allows me to upgrade to a more recent Ubuntu-like Linux version (I am currently still using 8.04 with PulseAudio disabled, see here for how-to do this in Hardy.)

PulseAudio/its implementation in Ubuntu have been extremely frustrating for me and I am glad that with openArtist there is now an up to date solution for those who like the general idea of Ubuntu but need to have things configured and documented in a more user friendly way!

Also very interesting: there is “massive blender focus” in openArtist (see openArtist website/documentation: features > blender).

For a full list of included 2D, 3D, Audio, Video, VJ etc. software have a look at the openArtist website.

Note that currently there is no 64-bit version of openArtist and that it is bound to one user (“tux”). Make sure to read the readme before/after installation files on the desktop!